Editing XML: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (2/5) - exploring XML

Editing XML: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The Freewarers

The freeware junkies like to take advantage of the newest software developments but are
reluctant to spend money on it. After all software should be free, especially for seemingly
trivial tasks like text editing. Their prey is:

Microsoft XML Notepad

Microsoft has released a free editor that graphically displays XML data. It uses Internet
Explorer 4.0 Service Pack 1 and newer to parse XML, with version 5 validation services
are added. While DTDs and Processing Instructions cannot be edited inside XML Notepad
they can be added with a normal text editor. The application offers sophisticated tree
manipulation features like replicating subtrees, drag&drop and sports a state-of-the-art
Windows 95/98/NT4 user interface.

IBM alphaworks Xeena

Xeena is a Java application that is built on top of the Swing User Interface Library and
IBM's XML Parser for Java. The XML attributes of the elements are edited via a table.
Each attribute value is entered using an editing GUI component (e.g. combo-box, text-field)
derived from the DTD. The editor guides the user in inserting elements into
the tree correctly through a context-sensitive elements palette which prohibits
the insertion of elements in an invalid order. The editor has a Multiple Document
Interface (MDI) with full support for editind multiple XML documents and cut, copy & paste
across documents.

Pierlou Visual XML

Visual XML is another good Java Swing application for editing XML documents.
The author declares it as beta and advises not to use it on production documents,
but the price is right... It is easy to internationalize,
instructions are given
on the site.

Netpadd

Netpadd
is a Windows Notepad replacement with some XML capabilities added, such as a tree view of the
document structure.

GNU Emacs SGML-mode

Emacs is a free editor from the Free Software
Foundation that could back up as your operating system: It is fully programmable
(in Lisp), and sports many applications including mail and news readers, file manager
and Web browser, hooks into version control systems and
much more.
Emacs has the concept of modes to attach specific editor functionality to different
document types, such as syntax highlighting, spell checking and so forth. A special
mode
for SGML exists that also provides useful for editing XML documents.
Emacs exists on various platforms from the two major development efforts,
GNU Emacs and XEmacs.